Cafe Hitch-hike

2022-11-30

Someone's gonna fall in love

I cooked the arroz con gandules (yellow rice with pigeon peas, aka Puerto Rican rice) for the last gathering of my class since the professor wanted to have a potluck. The secret which I finally learned is there's no such thing as a low fat/ low cholesterol recipe for this dish. The best I made was at my brother's old farmhouse last year, and I must had dumped a cup of oil into it! So, I did the same, but as I did, I devilishly said: Someone who eats this is gonna fall in love with me!

I had to laugh and then cooked up a good sized kettle. Many of my classmates have Caribbean or Latin heritages and their countries have similar recipes, so I figured I wouldn't have to take many leftovers home! A colleague Claudette brought Haitian chicken patties and we kind of coordinated that; we had a group project last week where we wondered what we'd bring, and I told her I'd do the rice. She decided to bring the patties.

Someone's gonna fall in love with me... I laughed for a while after saying that. I got the idea from tonight's performing artists.

We had a guest lecturer for the last class. I stumbled in a few minutes late and felt stupid with lugging in a caldero (a pot made of thick aluminium) full of rice, and saw no other bags of food.
Claudette was also late and I was so glad to see she carried a box of food. The food was served in the middle of class and during our break.

Most of the class forgot about the potluck, but a couple others brought enough to round it out. Claudette and I giggled as we watched people serve themselves both the patties and the rice and we high-fived each other. She then explained our grade for our finished group project. As we created it, C and our colleague Jermaine joked that we needed to get extra credit because our project looked pretty. I guess the prof gave us 5 extra points because they liked ours and we included really nice images that went with the content in our presentation. We laughed for a bit to see our little wish came true. We then quietly smiled to see our colleagues enjoy the petit potluck, with laughs still in my belly.

The classmates loved the food, and I secretly smiled when a few guys asked me about it. I love the instinctual look of a man who is very happy with food I made for them: it's that look where they forget about everything and are relishing the food (and then sometimes relish me). What surprised me was the guest speaker who gobbled up the rice and said his country had a similar dish. He asked if I made it and I said I did, and that seemed to be a good answer. He paused for a bit and asked, "are you the person who works in ___?" I said yes. He then said he wanted to study my profession. I wondered why he would want to do that, but he gave a reason that made perfect sense. The speaker gave me his card and told me to get in touch so we could talk about it, and I said I'd be glad to, and he took another bowl of it home.

I figured the question was genuine and then some, I received cards like that in the past. There's usually a little spark when a card is exchanged or maybe the look is a little longer; when it's professional, the exchange is much more dry. I felt the spark on the card and grinned. Maybe I need to say those magic words after cooking and other things I create, hahaha! At the very least, I appreciated all the laughs and people in our last class.

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